Reggio Children Foundation

About the Reggio Children Foundation

The Reggio Children Foundation was founded in 2011 in Reggio Emilia, the city that after the Second World War created the Reggio Emilia Approach, an educational approach based on the idea of children and humans as holders of rights and potential. The Foundation promotes a close relationship between research and solidarity while advocating an approach aimed at promoting a culture of development and innovation. The main goal is to take global action to improve life in communities by promoting children's rights, starting with the right to good quality education.

According to the Reggio Children Foundation, education is to be understood as a public, participatory act, which calls for the co-responsibility of institutions, civil society and individuals in a context of dialogue and social management.

Communicating a complex organisation

From our first contact with the Reggio Children Foundation, it was clear that we needed to establish a new communicative approach that would be able to enhance an organisation whose visual identity reflected considerable organisational and structural complexity.

During the long process of dialogue and discussion with various members of the Foundation, we embarked on a co-design process and made their project approach our own. The process involved various members and collaborators of the Foundation. We worked together on building a new identity, one that would fully express its set-up and goals.

From the very outset, we intended to meet the need to express a strong and well-defined identity.

Complexity is active

The Reggio Children Foundation is primarily research, development and innovation. In designing a new visual image, we could not fail to consider these aspects. After having taken different paths and tried solutions that prioritised the modular aspect (which has always been a feature of our work), we realised that we were faced with an organisation that was impossible to categorise in a system.

The painstaking co-design work taught us that the Reggio Children Foundation is by nature active and constantly evolving. And the realisation that we were dealing with a dynamic, evolving system led us towards the search for a different type of symbol to our usual design approach, this time spores.

The new identity of the Reggio Children Foundation expresses a constantly developing organisation on the move, whose main goal is interaction and building relations.

The new identity was designed to embrace all the communication tools of the Reggio Children Foundation and to be easily reflected in the various forms of expression of the different activities and events connected to it.

Creating a website that expresses an ecosystem

As already mentioned, the Reggio Children Foundation is not a static organisation. It’s more like a complex ecosystem, where different elements interact with each other to achieve mutual goals.

The design of the new website began with a lengthy analysis that allowed us to identify a number of essential elements. These included the need for a user-centred approach and a structure that expressed the Foundation’s central role as a builder of relations.

Our analysis revealed the central focus of individual projects and the need to find content that facilitated the Foundation's usability, through call-to-action initiatives intended for individual users or potential partners.

The new Reggio Children Foundation website is a place to explore the operational aspects of the Foundation. It targets private users who want to investigate the various areas of research and learn more about applying the Reggio Children methodological approach, as well as partners interested in working together.

The focus on individual projects and on enhancing collaborations with various partners makes it easier to describe relations between the Reggio Children Foundation and different institutional organisations and public and private partners.

The projects section was designed to highlight the role of the Reggio Children Foundation as a promotor of relations. The attention given to individual projects and pages concerning partners enable the nature and structure of the various collaborations to be explored in much detail. They make it easier to describe relations that the Reggio Children Foundation has maintained for years with various institutional, public and private entities.

In technical terms, the new Reggio Children Foundation website reconfirms our preference for October CMS, one of our most successful choices regarding technology in recent times.

Client relations

The lengthy planning phase undertaken together with the management, staff and collaborators of the Reggio Children Foundation allowed us to consolidate a work method that focuses on listening and meeting the client’s needs. Our experience in the rooms of the Reggio Children Foundation taught us the importance of building relations and a bond that does not end once the finished work is delivered, but continues towards a partnership intended to grow and develop over time.

We can say that we have made the Reggio Emilia Approach our own.